In "Nuclear Now," his unmissable and intensely compelling documentary, Oliver Stone makes the vital and historic case that nuclear power has fallen victim to a perception/reality conundrum, one that is now in the process of being overturned. The perception is that nuclear power is dangerous: too dangerous to be an essential component of meeting our energy needs. The reality, Stone argues, is that nuclear power is clean, abundant, and safe, and that the ominous fact of our energy crisis—the looming catastrophe of climate change, the hopeful but stubbornly increasing growth of renewables like wind and solar - it is all too urgent that nuclear power is not an essential component of meeting our energy needs.
Those are the two sides of the debate, and they've been entrenched for so long that it's hard, at a glance, to see much room for change. But that's where a documentary like "Nuclear Now" (originally titled "Nuclear") comes in. I think that the film, seen with open eyes, could influence people's ideas on the issue of nuclear energy in the same way that "An Inconvenient Truth" moved. the needle on climate change.
Director: Oliver Stone
Writers: Joshua S. Goldstein, Oliver Stone
For decades, there has been a primal fear of all things associated with the word nuclear. The anti-nuclear power protest movements that took hold in the late 1970s and early 1980s lumped everything "nuclear" into one bucket: nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Everything was...wrong. That's why left-wing activist types, in the No Nukes era, made it a cult fetish to mispronounce the word "nuclear" as "nuke-ular." They were saying, in essence: the possibility of being bombed is inherent in this technology. Therefore, it must be treated as toxic.
If you argue against this idea, as Stone does, then those who believe in it will repeat the following as if it were an obvious mantra: “Sure? You're crazy. Six words: Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Fukushima. Fact." The fear of nuclear disaster is a primordial fear that anti-nuclear ideology considers a major deciding factor. There is no possibility of having a rational dialogue about it, because the pro-nuclear position is treated, by the anti-nuclear position, as if it were, in effect, the pro-nuclear disaster position.
What few will say out loud is that the fear of a nuclear disaster has become, for decades, a mythology. No one, for example, was killed in the Three Mile Island accident. There is inherent risk in everything, but the new generation of nuclear power reactors have built-in structural protections that are leaps and bounds beyond those that existed at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima.
And for anyone tempted to dismiss that argument as some extreme form of wish fulfillment, Stone invites you to check out the forces that agree with him. Namely: huge sectors of the rest of the world. Once you leave the United States, nuclear power has a very different picture. It has been used, for decades, to boost the economy of an enlightened Eurosocialist nation like France, which now gets 70 percent of its energy from nuclear power. And things may be changing even within the US. Anti-nuclear was, for years, a motto of progressive liberals, but 60 percent of Americans now say they're pro-energy nuclear.
The case for nuclear power, as the force that could break us out of our dire addiction to fossil fuels, has been made on film before. A decade ago, the great documentary filmmaker Robert Stone, no relation to Oliver, directed "Pandora's Promise," which presented an even more immediate version of Oliver Stone's case: that nuclear power has been unfairly demonized and that more and more environmentalists I think it is destined to be our savior if we are to rescue ourselves from the slow entropy of climate change.
“Pandora's Promise” premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, and I'll never forget the conversations I had about it. I'd say what a major movie I thought it was, and the answer would inevitably be, "But it only presents one side!" I thought: really? Is that your objection? We had been hearing the case against nuclear power for 30 years. Now here was a documentary that took 87 minutes to make the case for nuclear power. It just seemed like no one wanted to listen.
Watch Nuclear Now 2022 Movie Trailer
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